Sayers Sean, Osborne Peter (ред.). Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy. A Radical Philosophy Reader

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bourgeois, evangelical and philanthropic modes in which much

Victorian feminism was cast. Some contemporary judgements are

hardly less damning. Lundberg and Farnham, in their book Mod-

ern Woman: The Lost Sex (1959) wrote:

Mary Wollstonecraft was an extreme neurotic of a compul-

sive type. Out of her illness arose the ideology of feminism,

which was to express the feelings of so many women in

years to come. Unconsciously…Mary and the feminists…

wanted to turn on men and injure them. …Underneath her

aggressive writings, Mary was a masochist…as indeed all

the leading feminist theorists were in fact. By behaving as

she did Mary indicated… that she was unconsciously seek-

ing to deprive the male of his power, to castrate him.

In the Pelican History of England, the historian J.H.Plumb writes

about what he calls the ‘self-conscious intellectual bohemianism’

which deliberately set out to live in defiance of accepted moral

codes.

Men and women had lived in sin frequently enough in the

eighteenth century, but they had felt no compulsion to jus-

tify their acts on the highest ethical principles. The intellec-

tual bohemians, Godwin, Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft and

their circle, sinned for the sake of revolt rather than for

enjoyment and then justified themselves by the principles of

liberal philosophy. Squalid as their lives were, they had

important consequences for English literary tradition.

This is perhaps one of the most egregiously ignorant and preju-

diced judgements on Wollstonecraft that I have come across.

Most nineteenth-century critics, then, and some twentieth-

century ones, seem scarcely to have read the Vindication, and

thus failed to notice that not even on the most casual reading

could one find in it an apology or justification for loose living or

sexual libertinism. It was Wollstonecraft’s life and reputation

which largely determined how she was perceived. Ironically, how-

ever, if Wollstonecraft was often perceived by earlier critics as a

radical and libertine, contemporary perceptions of her, often by

feminist writers, have been very different. One of the most recent

essays on Wollstonecraft is by Cora Kaplan.

Kaplan’s critique

10 SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY

concentrates on the text of the Vindication, and from its pages

emerges a very different Wollstonecraft. Kaplan argues that a cen-

tral theme of the book is a deep ambivalence about sexuality,

even a violent antagonism to the sexual; an exaggeration of the

role of the sensual in the lives of women which recapitulates that

of Rousseau, and a fear of the disruptive power of female sensual-

ity. In the Vindication, Wollstonecraft turned against feeling and

sensibility, and they are seen as reactionary and regressive. As

Kaplan puts it:

Sexuality and pleasure are narcotic inducements to a life of

lubricious slavery. Reason is the only human attribute

appropriate to the revolutionary character, and women are

impeded by their early and corrupt initiation into the sen-

sual from using theirs.

Wollstonecraft’s programme for women, far from being that of

‘free love’ or sexual libertinism, is that of a strenuous programme

of renouncing the sensual; her ideal is that of a life in which Rea-

son is triumphant, but at the cost of the death of female pleasure

and sexuality.

Rather similarly, Diana Coole’s

discussion of the Vindication

stresses the way in which the book seems at times to require of

women an almost ascetic dedication to duty, and a rejection of

passion or self-indulgence. Both Kaplan and Coole and other

commentators suggest that Wollstonecraft’s feminism could really

only apply to middle-class women; the Vindication is, in essence,

a liberal or bourgeois feminist tract which, while indeed calling

attention forcefully to many aspects of sexual injustice and

inequality, failed to address the lives of working-class women or

even to challenge in any fundamental way the norms of bourgeois

marriage and family life. Coole suggests that Wollstonecraft basi-

cally shared much of Rousseau’s idealised vision of the patriar-

chal bourgeois family, away from the corruption and ‘false man-

ners’ of the city. And Kaplan writes that in Wollstonecraft’s text,

with its stress on the potential virtues of those in the ‘middle’

class and on the importance of Reason, idealised humanity

appears as a rational, plain-speaking bourgeois man.

In one sense, I do not think that these judgements are wrong;

they represent the ‘Wollstonecraft’ who appears in the pages of

the Vindication far more adequately than those judgements which

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY 11

have seen Wollstonecraft as a libertine. But if many earlier cri-

tiques of Wollstonecraft failed to pay any attention to the text of

the Vindication at all, I think that some contemporary discussion,

in focusing so closely and sometimes exclusively on the text of the

book, has failed fully to see the ways in which Wollstonecraft’s

work resists easy classification.

The Vindication has often been criticised for being rushed,

hasty and repetitive. There is some substance in these criticisms; it

was written in six weeks, in the heat of a political situation. But it

is not just that the text itself sometimes appears rushed; it should,

I think, be read as provisional. In other words the ‘Woll-

stonecraft’ of the Vindication does not adequately represent, all

by itself, Mary Wollstonecraft’s thinking about the situation of

women and the response she thought that they should make. Vir-

ginia Woolf wrote of Wollstonecraft: ‘Every day…something was

born in her that thrust aside her theories and forced her to model

them afresh’.

The Vindication needs understanding not only in the context of

Wollstonecraft’s life, but in the context of her other writings and

the ways in which these wrestled with the dilemmas thrown up by

eighteenth-century politics, both radical and reactionary, and by

contemporary views on literature and philosophy and on the

nature of femininity. These dilemmas were of course cast in an

eighteenth-century form, but they are ones which, in altered

shape, feminism still continues to encounter. Wollstonecraft never

had an answer to any of these dilemmas that could satisfy her for

long; and it is perhaps the restless and provisional quality of her

work that often makes it speak most strongly to those who,

nearly 200 years later, often encounter similar dilemmas.

Her struggle was formed around a number of features of eigh-

teenth-century thought and politics. Central, of course, were the

radical political ideas of her time. Mary herself became part of

the circle of radical London intelligentsia, including Tom Paine,

Thomas Holcroft, her publisher Joseph Johnson and her husband

William Godwin, who believed passionately in the cluster of polit-

ical ideas which centred around the critique of autocratic govern-

ment and hereditary privilege, belief in the natural right of indi-

viduals to self-determination, and belief in the perfectibility of

human nature and institutions if only corruption and privilege

could be swept away.

Mary was also heir to a steady stream of writing in the eigh-

12 SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY

teenth century about the nature and situation of women. She had

almost certainly read feminist writers such as Catherine

Macaulay; but there were men too, such as some radical teachers

in Dissenting Academies, who had written about the social

oppression of women. As Barbara Taylor points out, in her his-

tory of Owenite socialist feminism, it was not too hard to see an

analogy between a critique of aristocratic government and a cri-

tique of the despotic power of men in families.

Wollstonecraft

herself drew such analogies frequently; she also compared the idle

and corrupt state of the aristocracy to the state of degradation

into which she thought women had fallen. Not all of the radical

circle to which she belonged were by any means fully committed

to feminist analysis or goals, but lip service at least was paid to

questions about the oppression of women.

The eighteenth century saw, in fact, a growing interest in ques-

tions about femininity and female consciousness. This was impor-

tantly related to changes in the social situation of women. The

precise nature of changes in eighteenth-century family patterns

remains a matter of historical dispute, but what is at least clear is

that, increasingly, for middle-class women, the home was no

longer also the workplace, and married women were not gener-

ally seen as independent economic actors or helpmates. The home

of the nouveau-riche bourgeois was becoming a display case for

affluence, and his wife’s role was being reduced to that of a deco-

rative accessory in this display. The only route to security (of a

sort) for a woman was a marriage in which she was wholly

dependent, and for the woman who was not married, the

prospects were bleak indeed: the often humiliating and penurious

‘careers’ of governess or lady’s companion (both of which Woll-

stonecraft experienced), or a dependence on the charity of some

male relative.

This total dependence of women on and within marriage was a

central target of nearly all feminist critique in the period. But the

eighteenth century also saw the beginnings of an idealisation of

family life and the married state that remained influential

throughout the nineteenth century. The eighteenth century moved

away from the cynical and overtly sexually exploitative views of

women which had tended to characterise the Restoration period;

but moved away, also, from those religious views which had seen

women simply as Eve the temptress, the occasion of man’s sin.

Women became, as Janet Todd puts it, ‘the fair sex’, the Protes-

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY 13

tant virgin.

And there are two related aspects of eighteenth-

century thought about women which are central to understanding

Wollstonecraft: the idea that virtue is gendered, that it is different

for women and for men, and that it is female ‘sensibilities’,

women’s particular psychological characteristics, which fit

women for a specifically female type of virtue (but also disqualify

them from that type thought appropriate to the male, and render

them weaker and potentially easily corruptible). The overt dispar-

agement of women displayed, for example, by Lord Chesterfield

in his letters to his son, was displaced by the musings of writers

such as Addison and Steele, in new journals such as the Tatler

and the Spectator, on the virtues of the ‘fair sex’; a sentimental

vision of the gentle, feeling, but subordinate wife and mother.

But it is above all the philosophy and other writings of

Rousseau which form a backdrop to Wollstonecraft’s work, and

central to this is Rousseau’s account, in Emile, of female nature,

his prescriptions for female upbringing and female virtue. Emile is

Rousseau’s account of the sort of upbringing that would help to

form the model citizen and enable him to develop the qualities of

autonomy and self-determination; and the book portrays, too,

Rousseau’s vision of the rural family and simplicity of life which

alone would enable the citizen to remain uncorrupted by the evil

manners of the city. Emile’s virtues are to be those of self-

sufficiency, hardiness and independence of mind. Above all, he is

to learn to make his own judgements based on his own experi-

ence, and to be beholden to no-one else for his opinions;

Rousseau even suggests that Emile should not learn to read whilst

still a boy.

But when we turn to the education of the girl Sophie, who is to

be Emile’s companion, it is a different story. Just as Emile is to be

truly a man, so Sophie is to be truly a woman. ‘But for her sex,’

Rousseau writes, ‘a woman is a man.’

Yet where sex is concerned man and woman are unlike;

each is the complement of the other; the difficulty in compar-

ing them lies in our inability to decide, in either case, what

is a matter of sex, and what is not.

Rousseau’s own conclusions were that almost everything was a

matter of sex; and he paints a broad picture of female psychol-

ogy, female sensibility and female virtue which underly his pre-

14 SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY

scriptions for Sophie’s education. Resemblances and differences,

he argues, must have an influence on the moral nature. The

female is a female always, the male only a male from time to time,

and the characteristics of woman will always inflect our concep-

tion of her virtue.

What then are her characteristics? Woman, Rousseau believes,

has a power over men, the power of charming and captivating

them and of inflaming their senses. Women ‘so easily stir a man’s

senses and fan the ashes of a dying passion’ that were they not to

be carefully contained and controlled, ‘the men, tyrannised over

by the women, would at last become their victims, and would be

dragged to their death without the least chance of escape’.

It is

in their beauty, their wit and their wiles that women exercise their

influence over men; attempt equality with men, and they will sim-

ply lose that power—they will become inferior.

Women have their own skills, characteristic of the sex. Observe

a woman, Rousseau says, and see how she exercises her skills of

sympathy and sensibility, see how acute her observations of other

people are, see how she knows how to charm and even get her

own way by her wiles. She is not capable of abstract reasoning or

of general principles; but her skills will complement those of men.

Undermine these by the wrong education, and she will not

become equal with men, she will simply become an inferior

woman. Remove her from male control and conceive of her as

independent, and she will lose those very qualities which make

her estimable and desirable.

Woman not only possesses a different nature from man; she is

also bound, by the constraints of her life, to different principles of

virtue from those which apply to men. Above all, she has a

responsibility to her husband, and to her children, to ensure that

her reputation is above reproach (Rousseau, like many others,

regarded doubt about the paternity of one’s children as the ulti-

mate indignity and shame for a man). Hence, he writes:

You must follow Nature’s guidance if you would walk

aright. The native characters of sex should be respected as

nature’s handiwork. You are always saying, ‘Women have

such and such faults, from which we are free.’ You are mis-

led by your vanity; what would be faults in you are virtues

in them; and things would go worse if they were without

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY 15

these so-called faults. Take care that they do not degenerate

into evil, but beware of destroying them.

Thus, for women, unlike men:

Worth alone will not suffice, a woman must be thought wor-

thy; nor beauty, she must be admired; nor virtue, she must

be respected. A woman’s honour does not depend on her

conduct alone, but on her reputation…. ‘What will people

think’ is the grave of a man’s virtue and the throne of a

woman’s.

Women must therefore, above all, learn to be obedient, dutiful,

modest and chaste, accustomed to pleasing men and submitting

to their will. But Rousseau does not wish women just to be servile

slaves of men, or dutiful drudges. He is wholly enamoured with a

romantic vision of idyllic marriage based on idealised complemen-

tarity of the sexes. And he is afraid that women’s sensibility and

desire to please can easily be corrupted and turn into infidelity,

coquetry and false refinement of manners. His prescriptions for

female education are largely a response to these worries. Little

girls, he writes, should be allowed to romp and play: ‘Everything

which cramps and confines Nature is in bad taste.’

They should

develop what Rousseau really sees as ‘natural graces’, unspoilt by

the artificialities, ‘deceitful’ pleasures and corruption of fashion-

able city manners. But while they are developing this ‘natural’

grace and charm, they should also be closely confined and taught

from an early age to please, to be docile and to obey, to submit to

injustice without complaint. And, he writes, ‘the genuine mother

of a family is no woman of the world, she is almost as much of a

recluse as the nun in her convent.’

The charms of a (rural) fam-

ily life are enough for her; she may, under certain circumstances,

be shown the corrupt pleasures of the city, but only so that she

will come to despise them and that they will not have for her the

fatal attraction of the totally unknown.

In the Vindication, it was perhaps above all the idea that virtue

was gendered, that it should be different for women and men,

that Wollstonecraft attacked. ‘The first object of laudable ambi-

tion,’ she writes, ‘is to obtain a character as a human being,

regardless of the distinction of sex.’

Virtue should mean the

16 SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY

same thing in a woman as in a man. And it is Reason, she argues,

that is the foundation of virtue:

It is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not

result from the exercise of its own reason. This was

Rousseau’s opinion respecting men. I extend it to women,

and confidently assert that they have been drawn out of

their sphere by false refinement, and not by an endeavour to

acquire masculine qualities.

Women have indeed been degraded, Wollstonecraft argues, by the

sort of femininity to which they have been required to aspire.

They have become ‘insignificant objects of desire’, and their train-

ing in coquetry, sensuality and sensibility has undermined both

their strength and their usefulness. The minds of women, she

writes, are not in a healthy state, and she compares the state of

women to the state of false refinement, vanity and immorality

into which the aristocracy, especially in France, had sunk. The list

of pejorative words and phrases she uses to describe women is

long and striking; a few examples will convey the general impres-

sion. Women are enervated, their feelings are false and over-

stretched, they have factitious and corrupt manners, a romantic

and unnatural delicacy of feeling; they are prone to sensuality,

sentimentality, artificiality, coquetry, doting self-love, vapid ten-

derness, and a deluge of false sentiments. They languish like

exotics and supinely dream life away.

Wollstonecraft’s response, in the Vindication, to her own cri-

tique of the degradation of women does indeed at times seem to

fall into the ascetic denial of female pleasure and the strenuous

searching for virtue of which Cora Kaplan writes. Thus the

degraded female is contrasted with the chaste wife and, above all,

the serious and enlightened mother; ‘false’ sentiments are con-

trasted with things such as the ‘dignity of conscious virtue’ and

the qualities of perseverance and fortitude. Wollstonecraft argues

that love and sensual passion are usually incompatible with

mutual respect and friendship. She even at one point suggests that

an unhappy marriage may be advantageous for a woman, and

that the neglected wife may make the best mother. She argues that

women often waste their lives looking for a husband who will

love them with fervid affection, and that if a woman is not satis-

fied with her husband, she is less likely to ‘model her soul to suit

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY 17

the frailties of her companion’, and more likely to devote herself

wholeheartedly to the acquisition of reason and virtue and the

exercise of these in bringing up her children.

If this were all that she had to say on the subject, her vision of

life for women would indeed be depressing. But these sorts of

statements in the Vindication represent only one ‘pole’ of an unre-

solved dilemma to which Wollstonecraft constantly returned and

never solved to her satisfaction, which is that of how women are

to combine feeling and sensibility with the life of reason, indepen-

dence and virtue to which they should also aspire.

Rousseau did not suppose that the strict confinement and

dependence of women which he recommended would lead to the

denial of women’s sensibility or sexuality. He thought, rather,

that only if women were confined could these things flower in

natural and uncorrupt ways. In his depiction of the relationship

between Emile and Sophie he ascribes great importance to the

maintenance of a sexual relationship between them, in which

Sophie is to take as much pleasure as Emile, and never to be

coerced by him into sex against her will. Nor, as I have said, did

he want women to be just servile drudges. He distinguishes

between corrupt ‘artificial’ charms and ‘natural’ unspoiled graces,

and sees the former as the consequence of allowing freedom to

women.

In the Vindication, Wollstonecraft does not in fact always draw

a simple opposition between a life of reason and one of feeling

and pleasure. Rather, like Rousseau, she often contrasts ‘natural’

emotions of the heart, or simple or ‘reasonable’ pleasures, with

those which are degraded or corrupt. But whereas Rousseau sees

the dependence and confinement of women as a remedy for this

corruption, Wollstonecraft sees these as its cause. And if at times

in the Vindication she appears to recommend what Cora Kaplan

calls ‘a little death’—the death of female pleasure and sexuality,

this is somewhat out of line with much of the rest of her work (as

well as with her own struggle with the sexual and emotional

aspect of her life, which is vividly portrayed in her letters).

Despite the strenuous assertion in the Vindication that virtue in

a female should be the same as in the male, Wollstonecraft

remained attracted to the idea that women did have special quali-

ties, which, while not in themselves virtues, could lead to virtue.

In 1787, whilst a governess in Ireland, she wrote a partly autobio-

graphical novel, Mary: A Fiction. It is written in the style of eigh-

18 SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY

teenth-century ‘sentimental’ fiction, with a repertoire of rhetorical

devices which aim to convey pathos and to arouse emotion in the

reader, and a central theme is that of ‘sensibility’, a capacity for

exquisitely intense and refined feeling, and for compassion with

the sufferings of others. Yet in the novel Wollstonecraft is ambiva-

lent about sensibility. Her heroine writes about it as follows:

Sensibility is the most exquisite feeling of which the human

soul is capable; when it pervades us, we feel happy; and

could it last unmixed, we might form some conjecture of the

bliss of those paradisiacal days, when the obedient passions

were under the domination of reason, and the impulses of

the heart, did not need correction…. Softened by tenderness,

the soul is disposed to be virtuous…. Sensibility is indeed

the foundation of all our happiness; but these raptures are

unknown to the depraved sensualist, who is only moved by

what strikes his gross senses.

Here, again, Wollstonecraft is drawing a distinction between true

sensibility, which leads to virtue, and depraved sensualism. ‘The

passions are seldom properly managed,’ she writes; ‘they are

either so languid as not to serve as a spur, or else so violent as to

overleap all bounds.’

Wollstonecraft wrestled throughout her work with the problem

of whether and how women could achieve sensual and emotional

happiness in a way that was compatible with their independence

and recognition as rational beings, and with the problem of how

they could express and use qualities of feeling and sensibility,

which she often implicitly sees as particularly theirs, without

becoming mere coquettes or creatures of sensual impulse alone.

Her heroine, in Mary, cries out:

Every cause in nature produces an effect; and am I an excep-

tion to the general rule? Are desires implanted in me only to

make me miserable? will they never be gratified? shall I

never be happy? My feelings do not accord with the notion

of solitary happiness. In a state of bliss, it will be the society

of beings we can love…that will constitute a great part of

our happiness.

In Mary, there is no resolution of this dilemma. ‘I cannot live

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY 19